Autism Blog Ring

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Brain Differences

From Science Daily:Researchers at the University of California, Davis, M.I.N.D. Institute have discovered that the brains of males with autism have fewer neurons in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotion and memory. The study, published in the July 19 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, is the first neuroanatomical study to quantify a key difference in the autistic amygdala. David Amaral, research director of the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute, and former graduate student Cynthia Mills Schumann counted and measured representative samples of neurons in the amygdala of nine postmortem brains of males who had autism and 10 postmortem brains of males who did not have autism. "

Here's how they got the samples:“Back when these studies were conducted, it wasn't easy to acquire the brain of a deceased person who just had autism,” Amaral explained. “We are fortunate now to have the Autism Tissue Program, funded by the National Alliance for Autism Research and the National Institutes of Health. With their help, we were able to analyze more than double the number of previously examined postmortem brains, none of which had seizure disorders or any major neurological disorder other than autism.”

This is just the tip of a rather large iceberg: “We're in the very early stages of understanding autism and its neurological pathologies. It's clearly a process with many steps, and at least we are now one step further...One possibility is that there are always fewer neurons in the amygdala of people with autism. Another possibility is that a degenerative process occurs later in life and leads to neuron loss. More studies are needed to refine our findings,” said Schumann.